Private woodlands lost to California wildfire — and may...

1of9Ian Leggat in a grove of trees above his home off Mount Veeder Road in Napa.Photo: Carlos Avila Gonzalez / The Chronicle

2of9Above: New growth is visible on burned trees on the mountainside near Ian Leggat's home off Mt. Vedeer Road in Napa, Calif., on Tuesday, September 4, 2018. Leggat, who owns land on Mt. Veeder, is complaining that his neighbor used the fires last year as an excuse to clearcut a forest of redwoods, which were scorched but mostly survived the fires. Leggat says emergency timber harvesting permits like the one they gave his neighbor are being issued by Cal Fire all across the state, allowing property owners to ignore environmental laws following wildfires. Below: Logs are stacked on the mountainside near Ian Leggat's home off Mt. Vedeer Road in Napa, Calif., on Tuesday, September 4, 2018. Leggat, who owns land on Mt. Veeder, is complaining that his neighbor used the fires last year as an excuse to clearcut a forest of redwoods, which were scorched but mostly survived the fires. Leggat says emergency timber harvesting permits like the one they gave his neighbor are being issued by Cal Fire all across the state, allowing property owners to ignore environmental laws following wildfires.Photo: Carlos Avila Gonzalez / The Chronicle

3of9Logs are stacked on the mountainside near Ian Leggat’s home off Mount Veeder Road in Napa. Leggat says a neighbor clear-cut a forest of redwoods that were scorched but mostly survived the 2017 fires.Photo: Carlos Avila Gonzalez / The Chronicle

4of9Russell and Vicky Van Dewark hike over logs and branches left by logging machinery that clear-cut part of the mountainside off Mount Veeder Road in Napa.Photo: Carlos Avila Gonzalez / The Chronicle

5of9Ian Leggat holds a Douglas fir seedling growing on the mountainside near his home off Mount Veeder Road in Napa.Photo: Carlos Avila Gonzalez / The Chronicle

6of9The sun shines through a clear-cut grove of trees whose canopy was reduced severely on the mountainside near Ian Leggat’s home off Mount Veeder Road in Napa.Photo: Carlos Avila Gonzalez / The Chronicle

7of9Russell Van Dewark walks up a hiking/firefighting trail that was loosened up by heavy machinery clearcutting redwood groves in the mountainside near Ian Leggat’s home off Mount Veeder Road in Napa.Photo: Carlos Avila Gonzalez / The Chronicle

8of9Tree groves in the mountainside near Ian Leggat’s home off Mount Veeder Road in Napa.Photo: Carlos Avila Gonzalez / The Chronicle

9of9Vicky Van Dewark shows her distress over the loss of many redwood trees to a neighbor’s clearcutting on the mountainside near Ian Leggat’s home off Mount Veeder Road in Napa.Photo: Carlos Avila Gonzalez / The Chronicle

Tens of thousands of acres of private woodlands in California are being gobbled up by wildfires as the state gets warmer, winters get shorter and fuel gets drier — and these dense stands of burned trees, crucial in the fight against global warming, are often lost forever.

The fires, larger and more damaging each year, pose a major threat to the state’s 33 million acres of forested land, 40 percent of which is on private property. But they are especially problematic for the individuals and families who own a cumulative 9 million acres of heavily wooded property in the state.

Many of these small property owners don’t have the money or resources to clear out and replace trees when wildfires sweep over the landscape.

It costs about $400 per acre to reforest land, said Bill Stewart, a forestry specialist at UC Berkeley who has studied forest restoration programs after fires.

“A lot of (small property owners) ... don’t have the cash or professionals to do the job,” he said. They “take a big financial hit when their forests are caught in a wildfire.”

Burned trees on the mountainside near Ian Leggat’s home off Mount Veeder Road in Napa.

Photo: Carlos Avila Gonzalez / The Chronicle

More than 228,000 acres of private timber have been cut down since 2009, by owners using emergency timber harvest permits issued by the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, or Cal Fire. The permits exempt landowners who have been subjected to catastrophic events, like fires, from the California Environmental Quality Act’s rigorous timber harvest review process that commercial loggers face.

They allow property owners to remove trees deemed by licensed foresters to be dead or dying, and to sell the timber.

That is what happened with a 160-acre Girl Scout Camp called the Cove, which burned to the ground when the Nuns Fire raged over Mount Veeder in Napa County in fall 2017, destroying the forest and 110 homes.

The Napa County Regional Park and Open Space District, which owns the property, took out an emergency harvest permit to clear the damaged trees and sold the timber for several hundred thousand dollars, said Chris Cahill, the district’s deputy general manager.

Cahill plans to reforest the hilltop with redwood saplings. That puts him in company with about a third of smaller landowners who do raise the money necessary to replant, meaning a great many of the tens of thousands of acres of trees that are cut down every year after fires are never replaced, Stewart said.

There are state and federal cost-sharing programs to help offset the cost of fire recovery, but they are not well publicized and few people know about them.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture administers at least two programs to help the owners of at least an acre of land recover from large fires. The federal Emergency Forest Restoration Program can also be used to help pay for the restoration of land damaged in a natural disaster.

The California Forest Improvement Program, run by Cal Fire, provides long-term management help for people who own 20 to 5,000 acres. The state has other programs for land 10,000 acres or larger.

But the applications for these programs can be complicated and time-consuming, and the amount of help can vary widely. The matches sometimes require hefty initial investments and, Stewart said, many landowners are unwilling or unable to go through the process.

After the 2015 Valley Fire in Lake County and the Wine Country fires in 2017, nearly 14,000 acres of fire-damaged trees on small private plots of land in Napa, Sonoma and Lake counties were tagged for removal under emergency permits, according to Cal Fire statistics.

This year, more than 20,000 acres of private forests in California were slated to be cut, a number that is likely to go up dramatically as landowners assess the damage from the Camp Fire.

It is not just a problem on private land. Between 2000 and 2015, 823,730 acres of trees were killed by fire on U.S. Forest Service land in California. But, according to a Forest Service report, tree saplings were replanted on only 228,485 acres of the denuded federal land.

The attrition, made worse by drought and bark beetle infestations, is threatening the future of the California tree canopy, which experts say not only provides habitat for wildlife but also helps combat climate change by sequestering carbon.

Max Moritz, a wildfire specialist at the University of California Cooperative Extension, said wholesale clearing is not always necessary. The rush to clear the land, he said, can result in healthy trees being cut down.

“Many trees can survive pretty bad crown scorch, so there’s generally no urgency to get them out, or there shouldn’t be, anyway,” said Moritz, an adjunct professor at UC Santa Barbara. “This is especially true of species that resprout, like several of the oaks and also redwoods.”

But many private landowners don’t have the luxury of being able to wait to see if their forests survive, especially if the charred trees are near structures or walkways.

Treetops are reflected in a pool of water from a natural spring on the mountainside near Ian Leggat’s home off Mount Veeder Road in Napa.

Photo: Carlos Avila Gonzalez / The Chronicle

Ian Leggat, who lives on Mount Veeder, believes his neighbor acted too hastily last summer when he obtained an emergency harvest permit and hired loggers to chop down the fire-scarred redwoods on 41 acres that burned in the Nuns Fire next to his Napa County house.

“I think there were a lot of trees where the crowns were still alive,” said Leggat.

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Residents on Mt. Veeder say too many redwoods were cut down using emergency timber harvest permits after the Nuns Fire

Video: San Francisco Chronicle

Kim Sone, a Cal Fire forester who conducts inspections in Northern California, said Leggat’s neighbor complied with the provisions in the emergency harvest permit, which does not require replanting because most of the trees were declared dead.

More emergency permits were issued to private property owners in Northern California in 2018 than anywhere else in the state as a result of the monstrous infernos that raged through the area in the past two years. The top three counties for the emergency tree removal permits this year were Mendocino, with 4,373 acres; Shasta, with 4,055 acres; and Siskiyou, with 3,817 acres.

In the Bay Area, private harvest permits hit what may be an all-time high as a result of the Wine Country fires.

In Napa County, 21 of the 25 emergency timber harvest permits granted over the past 23 years were issued in 2018, according to Cal Fire statistics.

Sonoma County, where 56 property owners were granted emergency harvest permits this year covering 2,621 acres, had the fourth-highest total among counties in the state. That’s out of 77 total permits issued since 1993, Sone said.

Private forests in Lake County have also been chopped at an unprecedented rate since the Valley Fire, assuming the number of harvest permits is a representative measure. Sone said a total of 71 emergency notices were submitted in Lake County in 2015, 2016 and 2017. The bulk of them, 42 permits, were issued in 2016, she said. That’s out of 156 granted since 1990.

In all, 9,990 acres of private forest in Lake County has been approved for logging under emergency harvest permits since 2015. The only counties in California that saw more trees burn on private property in that time were Siskiyou, with 19,791 acres, and El Dorado, with 10,343 acres.

The loss of so many trees to wildfire is an issue in California, where Steward said too much of the damaged land is being left alone and converted into other uses.

“Reforestation is a way of assuring carbon sequestration and forest regrowth,” he said. “Mortality and reduced tree growth will definitely reduce the net carbon sequestration in the burned forest.”

Peter Fimrite is The Chronicle’s lead science reporter, covering scientific research, the environment and the cosmos. His beat includes earthquake research, marine biology, wildfire science and space exploration. He also writes about the cannabis industry, outdoor adventure, Native American issues and the culture of the West. A former U.S. Forest Service firefighter, he has traveled extensively and covered a wide variety of issues during his career, including the Beijing Olympics, Hurricane Katrina, illegal American tourism in Cuba and a 40-day cross country car trip commemorating the history of automobile travel in America.